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Pump action in Japan

Those who know him will have no problem believing BBC Designer of the Year Andy Davey’s desire to style himself on James Bond.

Davey is spending this week in Japan – the main market for the products designed at his and partner Anne Gardener’s London group TKO – for the Nagoya Design Business Fair.

It’s TKO’s first fair in Japan and the group wanted to make an impact with its stand. But Davey also wanted something he could carry in a suitcase, rather than having to ship a weighty and complex system around.

The result is something 007 might have borrowed from Q’s workshop had the special agent ever made a career change from spy to salesman. The stand-in-a-suitcase is inflatable.

Knowing that, it is no surprise that it has been created by Inflate. Davey met Inflate man Nick Crosbie at a Design Council do, (how can people say the Design Council is useless!), and the project expanded from there.

The stand is created around an LCD projector system that will project images from TKO’s own CD-ROM on to a semi-transparent screen, creating what Davey terms ‘a 3D, moving, kind of throbbing effect’.

‘There’s no really complex intellectual thought behind the stand,’ says Davey. ‘It is a collaboration. Inflate had lots of ideas and the last thing we wanted to do was to specify something when they thought they could do better.’

Crosbie says: ‘This is one of the more intelligent things we have done. It’s nice to get involved in something that’s about more than being just inflatable. This is more visually subtle.’

‘We are looking to cause a bit of excitement at what I imagine will be a dull design fair,’ says Davey. The only disappointment is that the stand does not inflate itself, a feature Q might have included for Bond. Andy is packing a foot pump.